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Research has solidly identified that high-quality candidates want a great role, in a great company, with great leadership and great benefits. So far, so obvious.

But most big players offer about the same deal here. To be competitive, they try to improve their offer (good), or say more about it in their recruitment pages, by adding hundreds of staff profiles and news stories (less good).

There’s another way to get more top talent through the door that’s often overlooked by all but the most world-leading brands.

Is recruitment different?

If you want to make a Content Strategist barf, show them recruitment pages from the average corporate website. Especially online application forms.

Not only are these usually a bible of poor practice, but the analytics show staggering numbers dropping out before applying, or somewhere along the way.

I’ve seen online job application forms with drop-out rates over 90%. In e-commerce, this would be called Abandonment Rate. Online retailers monitor this relentlessly and work hard to reduce it. Abandonment of around 20% is usually thought okay, but the retailer would still work to reduce it further.

Many recruitment managers explain their abandonment rate differently. They declare these people must be unsuitable candidates. They go on to say, their business wants to attract the people most willing to go through their process, no matter how arduous.

No, recruitment isn’t different

I think they’re really, really wrong. It stands to reason people who will happily go through an arduous online application process are less likely to be high-value talent.

Top talent are not hoop-jumpers. Top talent is time-poor and intolerant of waste.

I think employers could snare many more high-value candidates at all levels if they thought more like e-commerce:

Think of all your visitors as potential top talent

Think of your online application process as an online check-out.

What would this look like?

1. Focus on the shortest applicant journey

We know the nature of the work, workplace culture, rewards and leadership are important to high-value candidates. The classic approach to highlighting these is to add more content on these subjects.

You would never see this approach in e-commerce, where it’s understood less is more.

Rather than hoping top talent will take a longer journey to applying by reading more or watching loads of videos, employer brands should give most of their attention to the shortest path to apply:

How talent find outs about the employer brand, including specific roles

How roles are described

How candidates apply.

2. Streamline relentlessly

Enter Work for us pages from any other part of a corporate site, and wordiness, navigation options and the sheer length of everything explodes. Application forms are long and include mandatory questions not needed for shortlisting.

Employer brands should set challenging targets to reduce content, especially:

Overall number of pages

Length of job listings and role profiles (also known as job descriptions)

Questions in application forms: ask only what’s legally required or needed to shortlist.

Openness about salary and benefits also increases applications from under-represented groups, like women, disabled people, people from ethnic minority groups and LGBTQ+ folk. If you’ve ever faced discrimination, you naturally place more value on transparent recruitment.

4. Do user research with the right people

The rise and rise of user research has been a game-changer in the last 20 years.

One of the biggest mistakes recruiters make when testing their online recruitment experience, is to use their own employees as research subjects.

Using the fish you caught as a proxy for the one that got away is a recipe for confirmation bias.

Instead, find “cold”, but relevant, audiences, and avoid participants who may feel they must say what you want to hear, like interns, students, people considering applying for a job with you or people from organisations funded by yours. Advertising in a professional body email newsletter, and offering a small incentive, usually works well.

How will we know it works?

Good change happens through testing, not guessing.

Like in e-commerce, employer brands should continually review conversion and abandonment rates in online applications. They should look to user research and analytics to identify ‘pain points’ in the user journey and test ideas to overcome these.

You can check what I’m saying is right by looking at the recruitment pages for a world-leading brands like Apple, Google, Facebook or Tesla. You’ll find they apply most, if not all, of these principles.

Chicken or egg? Chicken, I think. We know people make businesses succeed. The recruitment processes of the most successful companies show they value people.